One one hand, I think this definitely shows the great success of the Jenkins project post divorce. As I discussed in these slides with concrete numbers. Were it not for the succcess of Jenkins, they wouldn’t be giving up the project.

But at the same time, I just wish Oracle saw that coming a few months earlier, while we were still seeking the middle ground. We were very interested in having the trademark moved under the custody of a neutral 3rd party, but they were very clear that that’s not acceptable to them. And it also disppoints me that they decided not to reach out to the Jenkins community about this move, when we’ve been conducting our governance meeting all open out there for anyone to join. But I guess they are never really interested in working with us.

I’m also curious how they intend to handle some IP related issues. Two things come off the top of my mind. The current logo, which is a Microsoft clipart. We’ve mentioned that to a representative in Oracle some time ago, but we haven’t heard back. Then there are about 6-month worth of my contributions after I left Oracle, which I don’t think Oracle can unilatelarly donate to the Eclipse foundation.

Oracle posted their proposal on the future of the Hudson project here (the cached version is here and here in case it changes.)

In this proposal, Oracle has not shifted at all from their original position that resulted in the community posting the proposal to rename. It’ll keep all the rights on the trademark Hudson, and it will continue to collect CLA from the core contributors. The proposal includes a clarified fair use policy to derivative work, but it doesn’t include any provisions about how the project can continue to use its name in the future, which was the central issue.

I think the message is quite clear, that Oracle intends to change the way the project is run, and that they are driving the effort unilaterally. You can see it in the proposal itself:

As many of you have pointed out, there can be a fork at any time. If Oracle ever did anything that the community disagreed with, whether it was enforcing new rights on the Hudson name, or trying to muscle the community, the community could always fork at that point in time. That is one of the assurances against a corporation doing things like that. … There are many ways to run an open source project. I think in order for Hudson to grow and reach more people the core community needs to grow and become more open and equal.

Notice that in their eyes, whathappened in the past two months is not something “that the community disagreed with”, and putting a stop to a well agreed GitHub migration is not “trying to muscle the community.”

In my opinion, their proposal reinforced that our concerns were legitimate and what we feared is already happening. If theoutcryfromthecommunity didn’t win any compromise from Oracle, I honestly don’t know what will. This is precisely why we need to rename now, and not later. If this isn’t enough for us to be resolute, then we’ll be divided and conquered through a series of highly technical confrontations that cannot rally a larger community, the community gets gradually boiled to death like a frog.

This “our way or highway” theme can be seen in manyplaces throughout our conversation. They are going to dictate their will on us, when they contribute less than 1% of commits since I left Oracle. They think they have a proven record of leading open-source projects, when the record shows otherwise.

We rename the project to Jenkins. We’ll trademark the name, and transfer that to the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy, to ensure that the owner of the key assets cannot use that to unfairly influence the project.

For core, we’ll also start collecting CLA assignable to SFC for the same reason, when we are admitted to SFC.

We’ll foster the same open atmosphere that we always had, where everyone is a committer just by asking (plus CLA for core), proposals are discussed on their technical merits and not by the title of the proposer, inputs from plugin contributors are valued, and the consensus of the community trumps any single entity.

We’ll put an interim governance board in place, until the governance structure is secured and hold an election of the board members. I suggest myself, Andrew and, if Oracle elects to remain involved, Winston Prakash, the Oracle engineer working on Hudson, be the interim board members.

We’ll move our infrastructure off from Oracle-owned servers and for other infra resources that are hosted elsewhere, such as GitHub and Google Groups, we’ll rename them for Jenkins.